How does this work? I am using steam for linux all the time and never got any invitation to participate in the survey. Just now I was starting steam on wine for the first time in 2 months and bam it asks me to participate.I want to show valve that I am using and supporting steam for linux and don't want to show up in the survey as if I was using windows.

How does this work? I am using steam for linux all the time and never got any invitation to participate in the survey. Just now I was starting steam on wine for the first time in 2 months and bam it asks me to participate.I want to show valve that I am using and supporting steam for linux and don't want to show up in the survey as if I was using windows.

THERE IS NO KNOWN BUG WHATSOEVER, stop saying there is. And raven, you still didn't show any evidence at all that the survey is biased and you fail to do simple math. All you do is make nonsense assumptions out of thin air.I got more surveys on Linux that on Windows. And please, consider the CHANCES of being invited when the system you use has a little more than 1% of market share. Don't forget to study a little about randomness.

THERE IS NO KNOWN BUG WHATSOEVER, stop saying there is. And raven, you still didn't show any evidence at all that the survey is biased and you fail to do simple math. All you do is make nonsense assumptions out of thin air.I got more surveys on Linux that on Windows. And please, consider the CHANCES of being invited when the system you use has a little more than 1% of market share. Don't forget to study a little about randomness.

Given that the majority of the user base are running Windows, then it's pretty obvious that the chances of a Windows user being selected are much greater then that of a user running Linux, and that's all the results show. More people run Windows.

What the results don't show is a clear decline in Linux users (as Phoronix seems to be leading people to believe) because the survey simply isn't accurate enough to show that kind of data.

Given that the majority of the user base are running Windows, then it's pretty obvious that the chances of a Windows user being selected are much greater then that of a user running Linux, and that's all the results show. More people run Windows.

Do you actually believe what you say or just trolling? Anyway both points you made are totally wrong.

1. The results of a survey are just a "few" bytes of plain text. 2. Valve has enormous capacities. They produce more internet traffic than whole countries.

Also, instabilis said it all. /thread

Trolling? That would mean gigabytes of internet traffic based on how many users Steam has. And surveys don't activate at the same time, so it would be simultaneous. It would require at least one single server for just this task, but in reality, it would require more in different countries.

Looking at the constant download speed issues some people have, the all-time downtime when there are sales etc. we could easily say that Valve doesn't have a single unused server. They even moved the old forums to a slower infrastructure that can't handle the load of the remaining users sometimes. At least this seems to be the case, no official word on it though of course.

Do you actually believe what you say or just trolling? Anyway both points you made are totally wrong.

1. The results of a survey are just a "few" bytes of plain text. 2. Valve has enormous capacities. They produce more internet traffic than whole countries.

Also, instabilis said it all. /thread

Yes. Back in a few years ago Gabe said that Valve was the 4th biggest internet band consumer in the world.

Although they do have the structure to survey everybody I don't think they want to do so. The survey seems like just a cool tiny little feature, nothing more. But, of course, if they wanted, they could survey everybody, I don't see how this would be different than a client update, just some lines of code and everybody gets onboard. They would have to do this for a long time to guarantee that every user gets surveyed because not everybody is online all the time. Also, they could implement a feature that tells if that account has already been surveyed and to ask if the user wants to be invited again (in case of a dual-boot user), and another feature to disable surveys until the next month.

I'm almost sure that the reason that Valve just doesn't collect data every time you log on, and instead sometimes promt you with a survey, is a matter of privacy.I have absolutely no issues with Valve and others, knowing what system I'm on, but I would actually like to be able to opt in for automatic updating of the system I'm using, during connection of Steam. With system information being something you'd need to opt in for, privacy nuts needn't worry, and publicity nuts can opt in for broadcasting their system.

I'm almost sure that the reason that Valve just doesn't collect data every time you log on, and instead sometimes promt you with a survey, is a matter of privacy.I have absolutely no issues with Valve and others, knowing what system I'm on, but I would actually like to be able to opt in for automatic updating of the system I'm using, during connection of Steam. Then privacy nuts needn't worry, and publicity nuts can opt in for broadcasting their system.

An opt-in would suffice, to give users a choice to share their PC info with Valve for the sake of reliable results. I do not know how much internet bandwidth Valve actually consume, nor do I know of their capacity from which they would hold enormous amounts of data; but judging from the amount of players who use Steam to play games and store games on the cloud, Valve can handle it thus far. I don't see how a survey which collects data in some sort of text file would be so disastrous there. Privacy may be an issue, but in all honesty such a concept doesn't exist now-a-days.

Trolling? That would mean gigabytes of internet traffic based on how many users Steam has. And surveys don't activate at the same time, so it would be simultaneous. It would require at least one single server for just this task, but in reality, it would require more in different countries.

Looking at the constant download speed issues some people have, the all-time downtime when there are sales etc. we could easily say that Valve doesn't have a single unused server. They even moved the old forums to a slower infrastructure that can't handle the load of the remaining users sometimes. At least this seems to be the case, no official word on it though of course.

So by your logic Valve doesn't have the infastructure to even have 50 million users logged in at any given time... Oh wait...